Main Junction: [Closed] SPINNING YARNS -- the Tell Us A Story thread. (Closes 3rd September)

Memories are all that stand between us and Galvani’s frogs. Here is where we burn our anecdotes onto the face of the Interweb and persuade history we’re more than twitching amphibian meat machines.

THE RULES:

1. Recount a tale on the below topic. You have 300 words. Anything more than that will be flambéed with the righteous heat of Deletion. Repeat offenders will be banned.

Linking to a longer version of the story, or posting subsequent chapters, or anything which indirectly pushes it past that 300 word limit, will be similarly nuked.

2. Read – and comment on – the other entries, before you post your own. Partly that’s because you’ll look like a plum if your story is a rubbish shadow of someone else’s. Mostly it’s because you’re not an impolite shit, are you?

[3. Additional emphasis: “Topic.” TOP-IC. That means your anecdote should revolve around a specific subject, yes? The one below, in fact. Not just any old tale you care to share. Deviation = maggoty pee-hole disaster.]

THE LEGAL CRAP:

By telling us your story, it’s in the public domain. Don’t get pissy about that.

Right now you’re in a pub, surrounded by writers, artists and socialites. If you recount an interesting tale to entertain and endear yourself to your fellows, you do not get to bitch about it if a twisted version of the same tale shows up 30 years later on the other side of the planet. Stories are contagious. My advice? Be honest. Don’t make shit up. Don’t treat this like a fiction thread. It’s a chance to entertain and move us with your life experience. That’s plenty good enough.

THE TOPIC:

FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD.

[Let me repeat, for the sake of the dinlows out there: YOU HAVE 300 WORDS.]

There is almost nothing better than cooking, buck-ass naked, alongside the person with whom you shared the experience of losing your virginity (virginities?). Even hot oil jumping onto your knob cannot ruin such a moment.

I was working in a Mexican style restaurant, cooking things like tortillas, meat chilli dishes, enchiladas etc. One lunchtime, whilst being relied on to get all the meals out, I had to chop a load of mega-hot chilli peppers up; getting the slightest bit in your eyes results in pain to an almost debilitating degree. After putting them in the pot to cook, I ran upstairs to use the toilet, which was beside the eating area. I'm not so horrible as to not wash my hands after taking a piss, but why did it not occur to me to wash them before? What an idiot! Chilli juice! On the dick! I'm not joking - the searing agony was intense. I ended up having to sit on the toilet with my knob in a cup of iced-water, tears streaming from my eyes, making these pitiful moaning noises. I don't know how I got through that shift, but I somehow did. My fellow Mexican-style-stupid-restaurant mates enjoyed my suffering and thought it was funny ('cos it was) - buncha sick bastards!

My partner once cooked kung pao for us and tossed some habaneros in it. He entire body was spicy after he took a shower post-dinner, from having rubbed the liquid soap over his body. I kid you not, he was spicy when I kissed him, no matter where it was. Kissed his shoulder - spicy. Cheek - spicy. I felt horrible for him.

A friend went on a date with someone. It was a second or third date, they made dinner at her apartment, they made salsa, they ate it, and then he ate ... her lady parts. Which subsequently were ON FIRE because of chili-juice.

My employer has introduced a new computer, an Easy-to-Use home unit aimed at students. For the unveiling press conference, they've rented Heyden Planetarium in NYC, and hired LEONARD NIMOY to read the pitch. The event is catered . . . fine swank stuff. They laid out tables in the room where a model solar system spins overhead.

After a train trip to Manhattan and hours setting up the display units I'm utterly famished. As I'm about to sit down with my co-workers for the meal and the big show, I get pulled aside by the boss. A TV station wants to get some pictures of me (well, my hand) shoving the modem and memory card and hard drive into the computer's expansion slots. (It's got AutoMagical device detection!)

I spend nearly a half an hour trying to get things right. The memory unit is a wooden dummy that doesn't quite fit. As I try over and over to make it look as fool-proof and smooth as it should, Nimoy is giving his pitch and entertaining the crowd, who are happily digging in.

Eventually the TV folks are satisfied with the footage. I return to the table to find one of the company sales reps in my spot. A big guy. He's had my dinner in addition to his. There are no meals left.

My niece was due for her 10th birthday, which was special because, well, it was her 10th. Since I was having a special birthday the same week, we agreed that I would treat her to a restaurant dinner where she could choose from the adult menu. She spent over a week investigating restaurants with her mother, who gently steered her to a slightly upscale, but not too pricey establishment.

Seated at our table, my niece carefully studied the menu, and asked numerous questions about the items listed there. Then, when it came time to order, she looked directly at the waitress and in her best grown-up manner asked "Do you have macaroni and cheese?" The waitress said "I could ask the chef to make you some, is that OK?"

The mac' n' cheese arrived and it looked and smelled wonderful. My niece seemed to enjoy every bite. But the waitress had also brought a small plate of grilled vegetables, which my niece ignored. Near the end of the meal, the waitress asked "Honey, aren't you going to try your vegetables?" My niece again looked directly at her and calmly said "This is my birthday dinner. I will NOT eat any vegetables."

Food is le sex.Even chillies - up to a point. Lemon and parsley folks, it's the only way to be sure.

With 15+ years of chef work under the fraying apron-string, all my awesomest stories are horror stories and would more strictly fall under the category of kitchen stories rather than food, glorious food, stories.

Here's one that might fit though:

Some years back I was sent to a hotel in a town on the Scottish east coast that hosts an international sporting event about every five years. Because of the cyclical nature of the business they take on a bunch of agency chefs for a few weeks and get by with a skeleton crew the rest of the time. Six of us worked 18 hour days and at nights we drank commandeered beer and slept on bunks in a commandeered beer-cellar.

One of our guys was a very skilled and experienced chef. He was also a natural "leader of the opposition" sort - we called him "Shoppy" for "shop-steward". Another of our guys was "Scouse".

Late one night, Scouse got a call from his mate Jonny. Jonny had hit a deer on the road in his gigantic hummer with eminently predictable results. He didn't want the beast to go to waste. Could Scouse help?

"Tell him tae bring it here." Said Shoppy. "I'll show yous how to butcher venison."

Sometime after 3am, Jonny pulled up and we manhandled a tarpaulin-sheathed deer carcass past hotel security and into a refrigerated portakabin at the far end of the car park. There, on a trestle under a striplight, Shoppy skinned, gutted and carved the deer. The rest of us stood around watching in awed silence, drinking solemnly, breath smoking.

The deer was freshly killed, so it was warm and its blood was lively - likely a result of the carcass not having been properly hung. Chef work tends to desensitize you to blood and gore somewhat but we were all pretty rocked by how surreally fucking ugly it got. So much blood. So much. Buckets overflowing with entrails and bones. Sharp metal flickering and Shoppy's zen singsong voice narrating his own knifework.

The next day, as we unanimously refused to return to it, Scouse asked a porter to hose out the crime scene. This guy apparently noticed nothing amiss about a blood-washed portakabin yards away from batteries of television cameras.

Good lord, can I relate to that one. My dad used to drive home via some twisting old country roads, and bought deer home a couple of times. The last time he did, when I when about fifteen, he asked me to help butcher it. Dad had worked in abbatoirs, so he knew what he was doing. I, on the other hand, was less prepared. Still, I kept my cool even when catching guts in a black garbage sack. But t's not the gore that sticks in my mind, so much as how furtive the whole thing was. My older sister, though a meat eater, drew the line at eating cute deer, so we had to do the whole thing under cover of darkness. I can only guess what a nosy neighbour would have made of seeing us in the moonlight, hefting something heavy down to our suburban garden shed, then emerging later with black bags and buckets of blood.

Someone out there has probably eaten the tip of my thumb. In the 90's during a big recession that rocked Finland I was unemployed, and instead of the “unpaid internships for the unemployed” I decided to hit some schools, one of them a restaurant school where I was for the duration of the basic course in kitchen work. The school included a mandatory training in a restaurant, and I picked this rather ho-hum lunch place. Amongst the things I learned was that a lunch-place baked potato is a microwaved boiled potato, pasta is pre-boiled into vats and just dipped into boiling water to warm it up, and ditto for mashed potatoes, except it’s microwaved. Also, that immersing a badly chapped hand in a barrel of pickles is a good way to wake up.

One of my jobs was to prepare the salad bar, which meant chopping an acre’s worth of vegetables. One morning I wasn’t paying quite enough attention to the fast chef-style chop-chop cutting I’d learned to do. But not too well, so I sliced off a part of my thumb. There was cursing and jumping, and more cursing when I realized there was blood on the salad. Being a man of integrity at 22, I took the bloody pieces of veggies out, staunched the blood and served the salad (fuck if I’d do it all over again from scratch). And realized I couldn’t find the slice of thumb with a bit of a fingernail hanging on it.

The only place it could’ve gone was the salad trough. And no, it wasn’t there in the end of the day. I'm thinking someone had something stuck between his teeth for the rest of the day, and little he knew that it was a part of a human fingernail.

Sounds fun - I know someone who moved to the countryside to butcher old race and work horses, and to sell the meat. I was there to learn how to cut up rabbits last autumn, and when the schedules finally match, I'm going to go there to see how you cook a horse stew recipe that starts with "take one living work horse and a rifle".

@dorkmuffin:

Yeah, I know of a few cases of ill-adviced diddling / oral sex after a cooking session in the house of chilli fanatics... A mistake which you do just once, apparently :)

It is not suggested to use pancake batter to fry chicken. Even less so is the idea to use cinnamon in said batter. About the only thing you could do right in this scenario is dump both the batter and what chicken you may have cooked in the trash as it is more than likely now a gag-inducing abortion of cooking.

Even worse is the problem of ensuring you have cooked the chicken all the way through. Nothing says adventure like ten days on the toilet reproducing your cooking because you didn't take the time to heat some dead animal past the point of spreading disease and bacteria.

Granted this all pales in comparison to the act of sharing your cooking with another. The bemoans of someone who typically would suck it up and appreciate the time and effort, what little there was, that you put into cooking at all will eventually leave you to reconsider spending any serious time in the kitchen ever again.

And while any sane person would at this point, as mentioned in the first paragraph, dump the whole mess in an incinerator and be done with it, I chose to eat the devil of a thing after microwaving the bits that weren't cooked right.

The smell has not come out of the Microwave. This was a year ago. For some reason if I ever plan to make popcorn the damned thing always reminds me of my failure with the fond smell of chicken and cinnamon pancakes.

Oh and don't try to drink your troubles away post-failure either. I do not think a more glorious vomit has ever been produced short of competition-based Ipecac chugging held at a forensics body farm with ten week old cadavers who also smell like your ten day long dumping marathon.

Back in uni I knew someone who a, came back from the pub and 'ate' a pizza straight from the freezer. The guts of it were all over the kitchen in the morning. And b, she and a friend once tried to save money on food by subsisting on vitamin pills and stock cubes. They lasted three days, I'm still thankful I was out of earshot when that hit the fan. Of course, I'm no better, I survived for four years on pretty much nothing more than corned beef and nine pence noodles

I actually started a Boxing Day BBQ tradition in my family. It was years ago and we had soem burgers that we got from the butchers. I decided to put on a couple of sweaters along with my pajama pants and bathrobe and head outside in three-foot snow making the burgers. We (I) pretty much do something like that every boxing day now.

Back when my baby mama took off for Texas while pregnant, I was despondent and lonely. My friends tried cheering me up, and one misguidedly asked what I missed about her. She was a terrible cook, and on numerous occasions, after making burgers, I got food poisoning.

So, when I finally answered, they assumed I was making the grossest sex analogy in the world when I said I missed her undercooked hamburger.